Sourcing Remote IT Talents by Barbora Thornton, COO in Moravio

There's no language more universal than that of IT. Many companies take advantage of this by sourcing optimal talent worldwide. Finding remote tech talent with the right tech stack and expertise, coordinating time zones, and meeting other requirements to build an ideal team for a specific project or company is now as exciting as it is challenging. 

At Moravio, under the leadership of our COO Barbora Thornton, who has many years of experience in hiring global IT teams, we have vast experience in sourcing remote talent; here's some knowledge we've learned along the way.

Benefits of Hiring Remote IT Talent

IT outsourcing, in general, is gradually overcoming the reputation of cheap and poor-quality work. In the right hands, IT outsourcing is a powerful tool for optimizing performance and costs. But there are two sets of agendas we're talking about when we speak about sourcing remote IT talent—do we want to have them as employees or on-demand freelance specialists?

Employing IT talent from abroad is usually not exactly easy. As usual, the real world develops much faster than its legal representation. If we're not considering relocation and immigration, employing someone without a legal entity in their country is pretty much impossible. But luckily enough, the market will always find a way. There are a few international and already established companies that can deal with this issue for you, including global payrolls, contracts, etc. Of course, not for free, but if you want to outsource global hiring on a larger scale, it's definitely a way to go. They can also help you with onboarding and other typical HR activities. If you want to take care of all this yourself, you'd better have a lot of time and legal power.

Contracting freelancers or agencies is obviously much easier. Apart from technical qualifications, the contractor needs to have the capacity of a freelancer or entrepreneur (i.e., a legal entity in their domicile). We strongly recommend they also have professional liability insurance and a stable internet connection. What perks every company offers to their flexible workforce is up to them. People like that are used to working as contractors, so they usually don't need any benefits—not saying that they don't appreciate them. 

• Sourcing Agencies

To contract a freelancer (or generally speaking, to find talent), you might need some help. There are agencies all over the world specializing in sourcing talent for you. Their advantage is usually their knowledge of the local market, teams of sourcers and interviewers, a big pool of proven talents, and usually very efficient processes. If you get flexible capacities from them, they usually charge per hour (or day) worked, and you won't know how high it is—you are not contracting the individual but the agency.

Of course, depending on legal and commercial framework of the cooperation, the biggest advantage of this approach is transferring the responsibilities from your company to the agency—the resource doesn't perform? They will find someone to replace them. Do you need to find developers with experiences in some cutting-edge technologies? They usually already know someone. Do you need more people? You deal with just one contact. They also usually have some reviews from other customers.

• Sourcing Platforms

When looking for the right talent, one of the biggest challenges can be understanding where to hire remote workers. Another paid option to source new additions to your team is through local or global platforms. The degree of their services and the quality of the candidates varies dramatically. Some platforms have very strict rules for enlisting; all candidates go through their own assessment, and the platforms themselves give you percentile success rates of specific individuals or can cover the hiring process for you. Platforms usually don't provide a contract. Some others just take a small fee and that's it. Obviously, using candidates from these platforms isn't free—sometimes the platforms charge clients, and sometimes the candidates from contracts sealed through them. Checking the pricing is advised before you register yourself—so you're not surprised.

• Individual Sourcing

If you are sure you can in-house cover sourcing, interviewing, technical assessment, and the contracting process, the best option is to source candidates on multiple levels. Our best experiences are, obviously, with recommendations from people who already work for you. They know the company, the needs, the fit. And referral bonuses are usually money better spent than paying to anonymous platforms. LinkedIn, building networks, and headhunting in general have the best success rate in terms of retention. But the flexibility and time to delivery are usually not that efficient.

Of course, the combination of all these methods is recommended. But it very much depends on your in-house capacities, knowledge of the local markets, ability to benchmark the individuals, and the needs of the specific project.

AI in the Hiring Process

The rise of artificial intelligence has opened up new options to streamline and enhance the hiring process. AI-powered tools can assist in various stages, from initial screenings to technical assessments. For example, AI chatbots can conduct preliminary interviews, asking candidates standardized questions and evaluating their responses in real-time. This not only saves time but also ensures a consistent and unbiased screening process. Tools like HireVue or Pymetrics use AI to assess candidates' skills and fit through video interviews and gamified tests. Additionally, a lot od platforms incorporate AI to automatically evaluate coding tests, providing insights into a candidate's problem-solving abilities and code quality. By integrating AI into your hiring workflow, you can significantly reduce manual effort, accelerate the recruitment timeline, and improve the overall quality of hires. However, it's essential to use these tools thoughtfully, ensuring they complement rather than replace the human touch in recruitment. More savvy candidates are already using AI to go through the processes as well and that combination doesn't bring the best value at all.

Expected and Unexpected Problems We Met Along the Way

As time goes on and experiences with working with remote and foreign resources increase (remote doesn't necessarily mean foreign nationality—you can have remote developers and other roles within your country, just not in the office), fewer and fewer issues are actually a real problem. Some of them are actually very good to be prepared for in advance.

• Accountant. Check with your department or associate if they are experienced with foreign money transfers, multiple accounts, etc. If not, hire talents who's capable of it.
• Multi-Currency Bank Accounts and Alternative Payment Methods. If you'll be working with international payments, you'll need to work with all that. Even a company Revolut, Wise, or PayPal account is very good to have. Consider also cryptocurrencies; it's a nice perk, and usually the legal system can work with it with no problem at all. But I can't stress the importance of good accountants again.
• Currency Exchange. There are so many options on how to deal with that; even third-party services might be of help. And you'd be surprised how smart exchanging can not just save money but also make some.
• Legal and Contracts. That's a topic for a whole other article, but at the end of the day—no matter how good your contracts are, if your resource is based halfway across the world, the legal actions won't be worth it. You need good contracts mainly because of the following reason.
• Insurance. Make sure you have a good one and be strict on the policies of the insurance of the agencies and individuals you are contracting. In the end, we all want the best for our clients, so there's literally no reason why not to have one. Unless you are within jurisdictions which have a problem with international coverage (sometimes you need to meet very specific criteria so the client works with you—like, for example, insurance for potential harassment while dealing with the US).
• Time Zones. Figuring out how to hire a remote team can seem overwhelming, but with the right approach, it becomes manageable. Goes without saying, but think about clients and the team composition before you go to hire in +/- 9 hours time zones. Be sure you check with everybody on this potential team to be ready to work at specific times, ensure efficient asynchronous communication, and take responsibility for smooth cooperation.
• Bank Holidays. Similar with the time zones—an obvious thing, but it's good to have a policy regarding bank holidays. Your project managers should take care of responsible planning of the capacities, and sometimes it might slip through their fingers.
• Hardware. We have our experiences with sending hardware all over the world if the new team member needs it. Obviously, it's some risk. Although our experiences aren't bad, we are usually looking for the option to hire hardware locally—no purchase, no sending, just monthly hire.
• Scams. Whoever has ever dealt with remote tech hiring can spot a fake CV with a reasonable amount of certainty. Switched-off cameras, communication only in writing, overqualified profiles, strange places of origin, studies, and base—there are so many red flags. But some of the scam candidates are much more sophisticated, and it's difficult to spot them, especially if dealing with large numbers of assignments and automations. Potential fraud might represent a significant security risk; the quality of work suffers as well, and overhead expenses for spotting and replacing are high. Luckily, even for vetting the candidates you might use some services—for example, Skaut is very popular and has a good track record. But for small to medium businesses, being cautious and noticing red flags is extremely important.

All these problems are solvable quite easily. You just need to be flexible in your thinking and have good experts around you. Working with remote capacities brings another set of problems, which is much more connected to who you are as a company, as an individual, and who your clients are.

Remote Care Insights from Barbora

Welcome package? Some compensation for company events? One-on-one with HR? Evaluation other than performance? Feedback gathering? It's up to you how to approach this. What is the system of your remote capacities—do you consider them part of the company or just a resource for a specific project? We strongly recommend having these things figured out if any kind of retention and prospect in cooperation is your goal. If not, then you can forget it. 

Working with a diverse team from different countries brings a wealth of fresh ideas and perspectives, but it can also come with its own quirks. Cultural differences might lead to misunderstandings, and remote workers can sometimes feel isolated or burnt out. In a small to medium company like Moravio, it's important to keep things genuine and personal. We're encouraging everyone to be open about their customs and communication styles—let's be adults and proactively share our differences.

Good work is the ultimate goal—but it works both ways; not just clients need to be happy.

Read Also: Remote Care in Moravio

Performance Metrics and Evaluation

Very individually problematic, but it might come handy to think about it. Is the company HR responsible for the performance reporting, is it the Team Lead, Project Manager? What will the evaluation look like?

Our Experience With Going Flexible 

Going Flexible Means Really Flexible 

Once you open the gates of outsourcing, your sales are not limited by your capacities; you can deliver capacities on demand. But be in sync—do you have the capacity to find, test, interview, and guarantee quality in a short time? Do you have available capacities in the whole hiring process? What are your bottlenecks?

In one of the cases, we needed to hire so many talents that they represented 30% of our current capacities. In real numbers, it was a lot. The initial phase is always a little painful; the first real challenge is always to gather enough information about requirements so we can search accordingly. And also, because we lead the projects, we have the responsibility for the quality; we need to have a process and guarantees. We found a lot of suitable candidates; they went through our own testing process (we use CoderPad), and they were required to have technical interviews and live coding—and at this point, we found out there's not enough capacity within our senior developers to test the newcomers—and we found our bottleneck. Next time we'll know better, and we also found some trustworthy and reliable external technical interviewers.

We're not a corporate, and the quality of the resources is the most important thing to assure. They need to have what it takes to do the job and also to work with the rest of the team. We are trying to handpick the best ones, always. Of course, as our pool and experiences grow, it's getting easier. We have created an environment of reliable vendors, good platforms, and built a sourcing department which has the difficult task to understand what our clients need, what the team needs, to meet sales promises, and the candidates' requirements and expertise. The perks of hiring remote and flexible teams are undeniable; at Moravio, we will be happy to be your partner. If you’re wondering how to hire remote developers effectively, leave the difficulties of choosing the right talents to us and enjoy the benefits of our experience.